The documentary “Amnesty 79”, directed by Anita Leandro, will be shown free of charge at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN) this Tuesday (8), at 7pm, in Auditorium 1 of the Department of Communication (Decom). The session takes place through a screening authorized by Embaúba Filmes, the film's distributor.
The film is showing in several Brazilian cities, but will not be released in cinemas in Natal. The exhibition at UFRN will be free and registration is not necessary.
“Amnesty 79” is based on unpublished images from the International Conference for Amnesty in Brazil, held in Rome, in June 1979. The documentary recovers historical records that remained stored for decades and follows the reactions of people who participated in the fight for amnesty in exile in front of these images.
The film won the awards for Best Film in the Olhos Livres competition and the Popular Jury at the Tiradentes Film Festival, in addition to the Distribution Support Award at FID Marseille and Best Documentary Feature Film at FID:Rio. The film is an original production by Canal Curta! and is distributed by Embaúba Filmes.
Memory of the fight for amnesty
The images used in the documentary were recorded by two exiles during the International Conference for Amnesty and Democratic Freedoms in Brazil, held in the plenary session of the Italian Senate. The meeting brought together hundreds of Brazilian exiles and human rights defenders from different countries, involved in the fight for amnesty and the end of the dictatorship.
The records remained stored in a basement in Paris for almost half a century. Anita Leandro found a copy of the material on mini-DV cassettes, without sound, in a library at the University of Nanterre, on the outskirts of Paris, which specializes in political issues in Latin America.
The material was produced by Hamilton Lopes dos Santos, exiled in Paris during the dictatorship. With no money and no film experience, he rented a camera, gathered a small team and traveled to Rome with the aim of recording the event for future generations. For three days, he filmed the International Conference for Amnesty. There are almost two hours of material, shot in 16mm, in black and white and with crystal clear sound.
Using these images, “Amnesty 79” places people who appear in the records in front of their own traces of the past. The film establishes a dialogue between past and present and resumes the debate on amnesty that began in the 1970s, also addressing the maintenance of the dictatorship's repressive apparatus and the impunity of torturers and soldiers responsible for crimes against humanity.
Denise Crispim and the memory of the dictatorship
The documentary also dialogues with “Retratos de Identificação” (2014), a film by Anita Leandro that reconstructs the trajectory of the exiled Maria Auxiliadora Lara Barcellos, from her arrest and torture to her suicide in exile, in Berlin.
In “Amnesty 79”, the narrative follows another victim of the dictatorship, Denise Crispim. Images of his testimony at the Bertrand Russell II Court, in 1974, open the film. Arrested and tortured when she was pregnant, Denise is unable to speak and her testimony is read by a jurist.
Four years earlier, her husband, combatant Eduardo Leite, known as “Bacuri”, had been arrested, tortured for more than 100 days and murdered at the São Paulo DOPS by State agents.
Decades later, Anita Leandro meets Denise to show her never-before-seen images of the Rome Conference. In the records, Denise appears alongside her daughter, Eduarda, a smiling child who was born in prison and found refuge in exile, in Rome.
Debate on the Amnesty Law
The documentary hits theaters at a time when the Amnesty Law turns 47 years old. Sanctioned on August 28, 1979 by the last president of the military dictatorship, General João Figueiredo, Law No. 6,683 remains at the center of legal and political debates.
The law approved by Congress granted pardon to those who had committed “political or related crimes”. Based on this wording, the military granted itself amnesty and extended the benefit to agents of repression responsible for illegal arrests, torture, murders and forced disappearance of people, equating these State crimes with political crimes committed by the resistance.
This interpretation continues to be challenged by human rights organizations and experts, who advocate the revision of the Amnesty Law. Consid
